Installed card as required, drivers on everything are up to date. Bios is vanilla and I hear about dual core processor drivers but I can't find any.

My problem is. While performing some strenuous tasks on my computer I.E. Gaming and listening to a media player (I used to be able to do this no problem)doesn't matter which one I get terrible crackling noises and frame rates bite the dust hard. I don't even have to have a media player open sometimes it just starts failing in the middle of a gun fight and I have watched processor performance in the task manager and it is insane, both cores up at 50% just idle and if I grab the task manager window and wiggle it it shoots to 80% on both cores lol... if I open the Creative Driver Device and click Default... everything goes normal for a little while (like right now I am posting this and listening to Winamp). as long as I don't do anything to demanding. Pretty new to anything audio here... it started doing this before the soundblaster card though just not as bad so either it is getting worse or the card amplified the problem. Please someone save me from my own destruction I used to run CS:Source at max settings 70+ frames in a packed server ... now I get to lagg to death... this is a pretty fresh install of XP also

I've never heard of an audio device directly affecting frame rates so this almost sounds like a directx or software problem to me. Do you get any error messages at all or program crashes? I would run the directx diagnostics tool just to see if there is any file corruption and to test out the sound options. It might also be a good idea to disable hardware acceleration for the new sound card and see if that effects anything. If it doesn't then the problem exists someplace other than directx or sound card drivers.

Well I have got no error message yet, a program has crashed due to seriously bad latency\frames so I don't know. Will run Dxdiag and check that out. and I will check on the acceleration option also. Thanks for the tips.